Jonathan Ames emcees a round-robin reading of humorous, wise, bitter, and uplifting breakup-inspired poetry from this new anthology. Editor Jerry Williams and several contributing poets will be on hand to read and discuss their love lives and their work. There will be live music by the band Lunker. Come for the entertainment, stay for the free wine and beer!

About It's Not You, It's Me:
Award-winning poet Jerry Williams is a self-proclaimed expert in breaking up. Along with a crucial "two month grief regimen... of unintentional dieting... sofa catatonia... and medication," he credits his survival to the careful words of poets who have loved and lost before him. Therapeutic and transformative, edgy yet sincere, enlightening, wide-ranging, female and male, gay and straight, innocent and guilty, It's Not You, It's Me: The Poetry of Breakup incorporates work from an abundance of perspectives in order to explore the exquisite pain of heartbreak. Such top-shelf contributors as National Book Award finalist Kim Addonizio, bestselling author Denis Johnson, former poet laureate Mark Strand, Edward Hirsch, Maxine Kumin, David Lehman, and many others proudly offer up their wisdom on the various pains (and humors) of heartbreak. In this stunning collection, readers will not find false hope, but the real hope of genuine sympathy in love, hate, fury, and recuperation.

About the guests:

Jerry Williams teaches creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College. He is the author of two collections of poems: Casino of the Sun and Admission. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Pleiades, and many others. He currently lives in New York City.

Jonathan Ames is the author of eight books, including The Extra Man and Wake Up, Sir, that will be available for purchase and signing the night of the event. He is also the creator of the hit HBO series, Bored to Death.

Donna Masini is the author of two collections of poems: Turning to Fiction and That Kind of Danger. Her poems have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Open City, TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, and Parnassus. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Pushcart Prize. Masini is an Associate Professor of English at Hunter College and lives in New York City.

Mark Halliday is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Keep This Forever. His work has been included in several additions of Best American Poetry and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. He currently teaches at Ohio University.